


Cold around the Edges

by out_there



Category: Stargate Atlantis
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2005-12-19
Updated: 2005-12-19
Packaged: 2017-10-12 01:47:20
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 14,357
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/119433
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/out_there/pseuds/out_there
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"We're the ones who do the impossible.  We're the ones that find the solution when there is none.  We're the ones that fix this."</p>
            </blockquote>





	Cold around the Edges

**Author's Note:**

> An AU set at the beginning of The Seige trilogy. Originally meant to be written for [](http://ekaterinn.livejournal.com/profile)[**ekaterinn**](http://ekaterinn.livejournal.com/) (for the SV & SGA Flashfic Challenge) who requested "Zelenka and McKay discover time travel" (before I had to drop out due to real life and bad timing). This probably isn't what she meant. Thanks to [](http://monkeypumpkin.livejournal.com/profile)[**monkeypumpkin**](http://monkeypumpkin.livejournal.com/) for betaing and [](http://seperis.livejournal.com/profile)[**seperis**](http://seperis.livejournal.com/) for advice.

The explosion is blinding white, and it sears stars on the back of his eyelids. Blinking rapidly, Radek wills his vision to return, and thinks slowly, "We're alive."

When he can see, McKay's standing at the railing, watching the smoke rise. It reveals a hazy scene of destruction. There's debris across the gateroom floor -- small chunks of metal with melted edges, a large flat piece that must have fallen from the ceiling -- and a jagged hole above it. In the middle, the Stargate still stands, perilously leaning backwards. At the top, just left of centre, is an inch-wide crack splitting the smooth circle.

"I can't fix that," McKay mutters, repeating under his breath, "I can't fix that."

Radek shakes his head. "Not enough time." He turns away from the scorched walls and rocky floor, but as he does, he spots the dark grey of an Atlantis uniform. Rushing forward, taking the steps two at a time, he gets halfway down and has to stop. He can see an arm, grey sleeve and a pale, narrow hand, but it stops at the elbow. It isn't someone crushed, trapped, needing help. The arm just *stops*, it ceases to be; there's a straight line of where it is, and then where it isn't. Someone had come through to get them; someone had been caught in the blast.

They all knew the theories of gate travel, the dangers and precautions. It wasn't something he'd ever wanted to see.

When he turns around, McKay's clutching his laptop, his fingers white. "I don't think we can fix this."

"We don't need to." Radek forces himself to walk back to the control room -- forces himself not to think about explosions and disembodied arms and the amplification effects of an open gate -- and points to the screen behind McKay, to the large red symbols counting down.

"Oh. Yeah," McKay says, his eyes widening for a moment, "I forgot the part that involved our certain death. You know, if they'd warned us about that, I wouldn't have left Earth."

"Of course not. You would have chosen a nice, safe, boring profession, yes?" Radek almost smiles. It's gallows humor, this urge to laugh hysterically because there's nothing else to do, but it helps. "You would not be tempted by the advanced alien technology at all."

"You're right. Barely compares to the certain death thing." Behind them, the clock counts down to fifteen seconds. "But I still wish it was someone else's certain death."

Radek snorts, because McKay's bluster is loud and attention-seeking, but never genuine. "Anyone in particular?"

"My high school gym teacher." McKay smirks and steps closer, rolling his shoulders like he's really thinking about this. "Cathy Sheinbaum from freshman year. The guy who gave me a ticket when I clearly wasn't speeding on my way to the prom."

When McKay stops, he's standing so close that Radek almost expects one of those spontaneous team-building hugs that McKay never indulges in. McKay settles his hands on Radek's shoulders -- and Radek's sure he's right, up until the moment that McKay's lips land on his. There's three seconds to go, and McKay's mouth is pushy and demanding, but his hands are soft, sliding down Radek's arms. Of all the times Radek imagined McKay kissing him, it was nothing like this: desperate and beguilingly sweet.

Radek closes his eyes, trying to block out the smoke and destruction around them. He ignores the acrid smell of oxygen and burnt metal, and concentrates on the stale coffee flavor of McKay.

The hands on his arms tighten, shoving him away. "This is wrong."

Radek blinks, straightening his glasses as McKay scrambles to one of the control panels. Ancient symbols are flashing on the screen behind McKay, repeating themselves in red and blue. "What is it?"

With McKay, it is never the obvious answer.

"Proof that the Ancient safeguards were ridiculous!" McKay's fingers are flying over the consoles, pressing here and there, trying to work through subroutines that weren't designed for humans. "It's an error message. They're experiencing technical difficulties. Maybe we should try blowing up their city at another time."

The laptop is open and connected quickly in Radek's sure hands. "What is--"

"I don't know!"

"Where--"

"The error?"

"No, your missing sense of propriety," Radek replies as the laptop screen fills with code. "Where--"

"Quarantine. No. Life signs--" McKay stops talking.

Radek sees the meaning of the error and understands why. "Ancient life signs detected. It's your gene."

"It's artificial," McKay yells back, his voice getting high and tight with panic. "What sort of stupid system can't--"

"Look at the life signs." On the screen in front of him, Radek can see two pale blue dots -- one is a slightly lighter blue, showing McKay and his gene -- standing in the centre. The outer spokes of Atlantis are filled with orange: Wraith. Far too many of them. McKay is still ranting, stabbing an angry finger at the consoles, and the orange dots are getting closer. "Look at the readings."

"What-- I--" McKay sees them, his mouth drops open and then he swallows. "Certain death. That's a recurring theme here. Have I mentioned how I'm sick of certain death?"

The laptop is turned off, unplugged and bundled under Radek's left arm. With his right hand, he grabs McKay's wrist and sprints towards the northern corridor. For a moment, McKay's stunned enough to follow without complaint.

That only lasts a moment, though. "Do you even know where you're going?"

"We are hiding. There are lots of Wraith. We have no time to disarm the safety protocols."

"But--"

"There are less this way," Radek says, feet thumping heavily on the metal floor. Behind him, McKay is breathing heavily, but he's running. "Wraith will come to command centre. They *know*. They know where to attack. So we hide."

McKay jolts to a stop, yanking on his arm. Then a hand is clamped over Radek's mouth and he hears it. The ricochet of hurried footsteps, the din of other people -- other creatures -- running.

"They move fast," McKay says, under his breath, and that is a problem.

He'd been aiming for the armory, to see if any of the weaponry had been left behind, but that's two corridors away. Those footsteps were too near. He starts to ask, "Where--" but McKay has started to run again.

They run for a few more yards, then McKay stops and a door opens beside them. "Get in," McKay calls back as he scrambles inside. Radek follows and the door seals behind him.

Inside, the light is pale blue and the room is small enough that if he stood in the center, he could stretch out his arms and touch the walls. "Where are we?"

"Really small bedroom? Stationery cupboard? Bomb shelter?" McKay blusters, pulling the cover off the door's circuits and removing the circuitry crystals. Without those crystals, the only way to open it is manual force. "I don't know."

"Then why--"

"It's out of sight. And, hopefully, without a gene, they won't be able to find us." McKay takes a few deep breaths and then sinks to the ground. "So we wait and hide, and come up with a plan. A plan that doesn't involve certain death."

Radek gives in to the adrenaline flooding his body, his pounding heart and unstable knees, and lets himself crumple to the ground.

McKay's head flicks around, his eyes wide but his jaw set. "Are you--?"

"Frightened," Radek reassures with a loose wave of his hand. "Very, very frightened."

Frightened doesn't begin to explain this feeling, this absolute terror. It isn't fear of the unknown: it's the terror of knowing precisely how doomed they are. Of knowing how many soldiers it took to capture the one Wraith that was spying on their Atlantis. Of knowing how many Wraith are in their city, and how few humans are left.

It's an equation in the back of his head, trying to calculate the possibility of them surviving this. The odds are too high against them. The numbers rattle up higher and higher as he pats down his pockets, finds two powerbars, and hands one to McKay.

McKay takes it and has half of the bar shoved into his mouth before Radek gets his own opened. "So what do we do now?" McKay demands, his mouth full of food.

Radek leans his head back against the wall, stares up at the shadowed ceiling. "I don't know."

"Oh, that's very helpful."

"Here," Radek shoves the laptop at McKay. They are stranded, they are alone, but they still have one tool. They should use it. "Shut down access to the control room terminals."

He chews on the bland tastelessness of the powerbar as McKay powers up the laptop and starts typing.

Then McKay's fingers stop. "Won't the virus--"

"Was set to be released with self-destruct."

"So no virus," McKay says, and the tippety-tat of his fingers on the keyboard resumes.

The Wraith have had ten thousand years to master the abandoned Ancient technology. They've had scientists experimenting with human DNA, inserting Wraith strands into humans. They both know there's a chance that Wraith experiments may have focused on the ATA gene, too, but they have to hope against it.

Otherwise, there's nothing left to hope *for*.

"Okay, control is temporarily re-routed here," McKay says, flourishing a final tap on the enter key. "Why didn't we release the virus? Because for all of our concerns -- and I do remember them being many and varied -- I don't think taking control for a brief moment will protect the database."

"Not if they really want to access it."

McKay frowns, mouth and eyebrows pulling down as his tone slides higher. "I have been in a lot of bad situations and I am familiar with panic. You could even say that panic and I have a very close, intimate relationship. But panic doesn't help, so if you're panicking and this is a purely emotional reaction, I want to know now."

"Do I sound panicked?" Radek bites back, and yes, he can hear the fear and panic. He pulls his glasses off and they drop to the floor with a tiny clatter.

"You don't sound as panicked as you should be, and that's never a good sign. You should be. People who don't panic are the ones that just *snap* at the end." Radek rubs at his eyes, but McKay keeps talking, his words getting faster and louder. "This is disaster. This is doom with a capital D. It was bad enough that we had to evacuate and destroy Atlantis, destroy the database, destroy everything, to keep Earth safe."

Radek almost laughs. "Earth is still safe."

"Because the Stargate is broken. It's *broken*. That's not supposed to happen. But they can still find the co-ordinates from the database, they can still fly there the good, old-fashioned way." McKay stops, mouth hanging slack. One hand clenches the powerbar wrapper, then it drops. Radek watches the metallic paper fall, almost glide, to the floor. When it lands, it makes a tiny rustle that he strains to hear. "They can still find the co-ordinates."

"Hence, re-routing control to us. We can stop them from accessing it."

"But the virus--"

"Would leave us unable to access the system at all. It would stop them, but it would trap us here." Radek rubs his eyes again, wishing he could erase the image of that arm, wishing his understanding wasn't wide enough to know what must have happened to the evacuees. "No food. No water. Not even space enough to walk more than a footstep. This is not how I want to die."

"You don't think it would be better?" McKay asks in a small voice, staring at the far corner of the room. His arms are crossed over his knees, and Radek understands. There is nothing cowardly about being frightened of what you know.

"I think we need sleep. I've slept five hours in the last two days."

"Three." McKay's voice is back to normal: smug and showing there are many ways to play one-upmanship.

"So we sleep. Then we work out what we're doing."

He lies down, and despite the fear and the adrenaline, the knowledge and the numbers ticking higher in the back of his brain, he sleeps, too exhausted to dream. It's a small mercy.

***

The floors in Atlantis are as hard as anywhere else, so Radek wakes up with sore shoulders and an aching neck. Stretching to the side, his neck cracks and alleviates the threatening headache. McKay is curled on his side, back against the wall, snoring. It's hard to believe that he's almost as loud asleep as he is awake, but it's true.

He finds himself thinking that Elizabeth had been organized. There were lists and schedules for military and civilian personnel alike. Everyone had groups and team leaders, enough time to pack their belongings, to clear their rooms, to move everything to the tents that had been set up as a temporary measure on M1K-439 (Planet Waterfall, as Ford referred to it). McKay had radioed them from the satellite, explained that the Wraith hadn't appeared, that they were returning empty-handed, and Elizabeth had used the time well. Fifteen hours later, when McKay returned, the base camp had already been set up, conveniently close -- lethally close, Radek's mind amends -- to the Stargate.

People had been moved, living spaces had been divvied up, and the Stargate control crystal had been removed and replaced, leaving the only reference to Earth in the Ancient database. A few hours after McKay returned, the barest of skeleton crews walked back through the gate and set the self-destruct sequence, then returned to the green fields, blue skies and distant purple hills of the Alpha site, their new home.

Radek remembers standing under the bright sunshine, staring at the liquid cobalt of the open gate; remembers the tight lines around Elizabeth's eyes as she swallowed and bid her own silent farewell to their shining city, and told them to close it. It had whooshed shut, leaving an empty circle of horizon and no one said a word.

Then McKay dashed forward, yelling at poor Downes to open the gate again -- now! -- and whining about his laptop. Radek had blinked, had needed a moment to process the loud words and waving hands into meaning, but in that time Downes had reacted, had opened the gate and McKay had scurried through. Turning to Elizabeth, walking backwards to the gate, Radek had explained, "His laptop. We used it to set the virus, it's been left at the control room. It has research, calculations. It's important."

A pair of tiny creases appeared between Elizabeth's brows, and she had sucked in a quick breath. "The self-destruct sequence has already been set."

"We have time. I'll get him. Help him disconnect. We'll return," Radek called over his shoulder a moment before he stepped through the gateroom. It had taken a moment for his eyes to adjust to the dimmed room -- to the lack of harsh sunlight -- as he walked up the steps.

McKay was typing with his right hand, tapping his left against the bench as he waited for the laptop to transfer the virus program. "Do you realize how stupid it is for both of us to be here? There's no need for two of us to risk our lives."

"Two hands," Radek replied, taking one of the Ancient consoles and making sure the virus was primed correctly, "twice as quick." It took a minute to transfer the program under the rippling light of the open gate. It took another thirty seconds to disconnect and close the laptop, and then the world exploded into fire and light.

There is a small part of Radek that wants to blame McKay for this entire event. A small part of him that says that McKay should have completed the transfer earlier but he knows McKay was sleep-deprived and overseeing too much to be expected to remember every detail. A sharp, spiteful part of him thinks McKay should have left his laptop to be destroyed, or that he should have left McKay, should have told Elizabeth to close down the gate and let McKay die with his precious laptop and his beloved city. And there is part of him -- the part that feels twisted and hardened like warped glass -- that whispers that the self-destruct would have worked, if McKay had been dead. He doesn't want to think it, but it's impossible to ignore what you know.

Radek stands up, stretches, and then kneels on the floor and opens the laptop. The biometrics scanner is still online, hooked up to the main life signs detector. The movement of orange dots around the city blueprint is fascinating, mesmerizing. There are clusters gathered in the biggest rooms -- the cafeteria, the gate room, the meeting room, the recreation areas -- and those clusters keep growing larger, denser. Radek theorizes that they are beaming more Wraith in, since the clusters keep growing without any dots walking through the doors.

There are also groups of two or three roaming Atlantis's corridors, circling through the city in a patterned web. Radek spends an hour watching them follow the same route at the same time interval. He opens a spreadsheet and starts to note it. It could be because he needs something to do, something to focus on, but it feels important.

When McKay wakes, he groans, flails an arm, hits his wrist against the wall and swears. Then he opens his eyes and sits up. "We need to fix this."

"Your wrist?" Radek feels his eyebrows rise, and he tilts his head down so he can see McKay over the rim of his glasses. "This is not the time for you to imagine illnesses you do not have."

"I am actually hypoglycemic, thank you very much. I could get Carson to--" McKay stops, his jaw clacking shut. Radek doesn't say anything because there's nothing to say. They both know what they won't say out loud: that the others -- all of them -- couldn't have possibly survived the blast. That an open gate would have absorbed the explosion, and the wormhole would have magnified it, would have given it the power of a nuclear reaction. That they are -- in every sense of the word -- alone in this situation.

McKay blinks, and as quickly as that, he's on to the next thought. "Anyway, I wasn't talking about my wrist. I was talking about this, this whole disastrous thing that's happened. We need to fix it."

He wants to ask how, but instead, he says, "Why?"

"Because that's what we do." McKay's shoulders are set, and he's waving his hands, strong fingers stretched wide. His voice is firm and confident, and Radek's almost ready to believe in anything at this moment. "We're scientists. We came here to learn and fix things. The military's here to shoot, and when force can't solve a problem, we fix it. We're the ones who do the impossible. We're the ones that find the solution when there is none. We're the ones that fix this."

"Rodney." Radek sighs, and it isn't a defeat, but it feels like it. "How--"

"We'll divide the problem into pieces. Solve one bit at a time." McKay stands up, paces three steps to one wall, and then turns around and paces back in short, energized steps. "First problem is keeping us alive."

"Food," Radek suggests.

"And water."

"But the cafeteria is impossible. It is filled with Wraith, and more are beaming in every ten minutes."

"Doesn't matter," McKay says, still pacing like a rat in a tiny, tiny cage. "All supplies were cleared out and taken with the evacuees." Then McKay snaps his fingers and stops pacing. "My quarters."

"What?"

McKay's face splits into a wide grin. "I almost forgot. I have a stash of MREs there. For emergencies."

"We were abandoning the city permanently," Radek says slowly, pushing his glasses up, "and setting it to self-destruct, and you left behind food supplies, in case of emergency?"

"And look what happened! I think my foresight is proving to be pretty invaluable right now."

McKay is starting to puff up like a balloon, so Radek interrupts before the self-congratulations begin. "How much food?"

"A week's worth. Enough so I wouldn't be hungry."

"So, for two people eating regular rations, that would last, what? A month?" McKay glares at him, but Radek feels no guilt. It's well-known that McKay's eyes are much larger than his stomach.

"Two weeks, maybe. If we ration."

"And clean water," Radek points out.

"And hot showers."

Radek stretches his arms above his head, and pulls his shoulder painfully. "And a bed to sleep in."

"And enough floor to pace on."

Which leaves the problem of getting to McKay's room. Radek pulls up the life signs detector and the spreadsheet. He knew it was important. "They are patrolling. Through our corridor," he points to the two blue dots, huddled together a small distance away from the control room, "and past, to the cafeteria, and then up to the jumper bay."

"But not past my quarters, so once we get to that corridor--"

"We should be safe as long as--"

"We make it quick."

"The next patrol is in ten minutes." Radek swallows. His palms are sweating; it's a natural reaction to considering sneaking past creatures that are both faster and stronger than you, and able to eat you with a single touch. He suddenly realizes that they don't know how the Wraith hunt, if they have higher senses of smell or hearing. He swallows again. "After that, we have twenty-five minutes before they come."

McKay nods. Then he sits down, pulls off a shoe, tugs his sock around, and puts his shoe back on.

"What are you doing?"

McKay's grin is a little wild around the edges. "I'm not going to stop to tie up my shoelaces."

***

Radek thinks it's amazing that ten minutes in a small room can feel like an eternity. He spends most of the time looking at his watch, watching seconds count down. The worst thing is the way that Atlantis was built to muffle noise, the way that they can't hear footsteps passing by. Instead, they have to rely on watches and Radek's calculations, because the laptop's already packed up. Once the patrol has passed them, they can't afford to waste time disconnecting cords.

They count down until the patrol should be there, should be passing them, and then they give it a minute before McKay inserts the crystal circuitry and opens the door.

Then they walk, carefully, quietly, down the corridor. They don't know how sensitive Wraith hearing is -- and it's frustrating not to know that, not to be able to calculate the risks -- and neither of them are known for grace under pressure, so they're walking. Less chance of spraining an ankle, less chance of falling over and damaging the laptop, less chance of alerting the enemy to their presence.

But it's hard to walk when every self-preserving instinct is screaming to run. Hard to swallow down the panic, to reject the urge to babble, to keep this quiet and orderly.

Radek finds himself staring at his feet, watching his beat-up, grayed sneakers step over familiar floors. The first time he walked this corridor, they were under threat. They were waiting for an ocean of water to descend upon the sunken city, to crush it and destroy everything the Ancients had left behind. It feels like such a long time ago.

So much -- and so little -- has changed.

He's still terrified of dying, terrified of being the one that killed Atlantis, but he knows these corridors now. He knows that the door on his left leads to a small set of stairs that open beneath Elizabeth's office. He knows that he could take the next turn right, and then left, and then right again, and find himself in the recreation areas; that, normally, he could go there and find groups of people, civilians and armed services, sitting around and enjoying their time off. Normally there would be music playing, or an old film or TV series showing on one of the screens. That he could sit there and not have to talk, not have to translate thoughts from Czech into English into words, and watch the people around him.

He could watch them laugh and tease each other. He could watch the ones with quiet, homesick eyes, the ones that were missing an anniversary or a birthday back on Earth. It occurs to him that he never learnt their names.

They turn a corridor and it is darker here. The only illumination comes from small lights along the floor. He shoots a questioning glance at McKay but McKay shakes his head, meaning that it isn't him, that it isn't his gene doing this. Walking in the half-dark makes this even worse.

Atlantis is a city of light, a city made to sparkle and shine. Instead, her corridors are dark and her walls have been breached. And unless he and McKay can stop it, her deepest secrets will be ransacked and revealed. It's not a good thought, but if he concentrates on it, he can resist the urge to look behind them, to see if there's anything following them in the dark.

He hears McKay's footsteps begin to quicken, and that's easier. Easier to reach out and grasp McKay's shoulder, easier to be the calm one for someone else.

McKay drags a deep breath through his nose, nostrils flaring like they're trying to compensate for the way McKay's hands can't wave while holding the laptop so tightly, and nods. His footsteps slow down again, and Radek is listening, listening to the two sets of feet, listening for any other sounds. The only other thing he can hear is his heartbeat.

The trek continues, walking through a corridor that he normally avoids -- not because he dislikes the area, but because it's quicker to use the teleportation system -- and around another corner. They're close now, only a corridor away, and Radek's watch is saying they've been walking for fifteen minutes. They can make this.

The last corridor lasts for hours, like it's in a universe that has a different flow of time. With every step, Radek keeps waiting to hear Wraith running behind them. They don't, so it remains eerily quiet: the sound of their footsteps, their anxious breaths, swallowed by the darkness.

When they stop at McKay's door, McKay isn't the only one with shaking hands.

Between them, they pull off the cover and hotwire the door, forcing it to let them in. They replace the cover, but not the crystals, and walk inside. When the door closes behind them, Radek is overwhelmingly relieved, and might need to throw up.

"I never, ever want to do that again," McKay manages as he puts the laptop down beside the bed.

Radek opens his mouth to reply, but the nausea forces him to run to the bathroom, to clumsily fall to his knees and empty his stomach. After he's thrown up everything he's eaten for the last week, he washes his face and rinses his mouth. His reflection frowns back at him with wild, unkempt hair and dark circles under his eyes. He looks away quickly.

In the bedroom, McKay is levering up a section of the wall and pulling out a backpack, which he empties onto the bed. There are MREs and powerbars in several different flavors -- although there's an uncommonly high number of the not-quite-chocolate flavor -- and McKay was right. Starvation won't be a problem for weeks. "Food really is a source of security for you, isn't it?"

McKay raises one lip in a sneer. "For that, I get all the chocolate powerbars."

"Take them," Radek replies with a shrug. "They don't taste like chocolate."

"That must be the shock talking."

Radek rolls his eyes and then picks up a peanut butter powerbar. He doesn't feel like eating but it's practical, necessary. "It's not the shock. Your taste buds are warped, McKay."

McKay wolfs down half of a pretending-to-be-chocolate powerbar in a matter of seconds. The scientists who work under McKay's command have called him a lot of inappropriate insults, but 'The Human Garbage Disposal' is both a popular and accurate nickname.

As Radek dutifully chews, he sorts through McKay's squirreled supplies. Food, a handful of pens, a few small notebooks, medical supplies -- one epipen, a packet of painkillers and a few rolls of bandages -- and inside a small pocket, an unopened twin packet of toothbrushes and three tubes of Colgate toothpaste.

"You packed toothbrushes for an emergency, but didn't think to pack something more useful? For instance, a spare laptop battery?"

"Firstly," McKay says, with a dismissive glare, "the spare batteries are kept in the storerooms. If one had gone missing, it would have been noticed. Secondly, those batteries are heavy and if I didn't have my laptop, it would have been a complete waste. Whereas I always have my teeth, and I'm pretty sure that it's easier to find food and water in the wild than a tube of toothpaste. Do you know the number of germs that live in the human mouth? The devastating effects of cavities and infections? Gingivitis is no laughing matter."

Radek swallows, then pushes the empty wrappers back inside the bag. "Now we have basic supplies, so what do we do?"

"We fix this."

"How?"

"By working out precisely what went wrong," McKay says, like anything can be fixed, "and correcting it."

"What went wrong?" Radek repeats slowly. "We came to an alien galaxy, we woke up vast numbers of life-sucking aliens and then were attacked with overwhelming force. What part of that can we fix?"

"What about the part that involved us destroying the Ancient database? Maybe we can save some it, send it back to Earth."

"Through the Stargate that is broken? Or using the depleted ZPM that we calculated would only open the connection to Earth for 1.3 seconds? Or using the compression code that you yourself could not finish?"

McKay scowls and stretches out along the bed. "That's not helping. There's only supposed to be one sarcastic cynic here, and that's me."

"You're being optimistic." Just like he is every time they're asked for a timeframe or estimation. McKay whines and insults others, but he always believes himself capable of forcing the universe to suit his needs. "There was an opening for a new cynic."

"It's still not helping." McKay kicks one shoe off, and then the other, and wiggles across until the pillow is under his head. "The other problem was with Teyla's timeline. Obviously the Wraith got here faster than expected."

Radek sighs. Standing up, he pulls off his own shoes and drags his socks off. "We calculated it with the best knowledge we had at the time."

"But it explains why we didn't intercept them with the weapons satellite. They were traveling faster than we realized."

"They'd already passed it." Radek remembered the look on McKay's face, the expression when they'd come back without even sighting the Wraith. He'd spent thirty hours in a puddlejumper, another two re-wiring the satellite, and another one waiting around for the Wraith to show, and it had all been for nothing. "So we know more about how Wraith travel. It doesn't help."

McKay bristles, his hands waving and gesturing at the ceiling. "If we have to escape in a jumper, we'll know if we can outrun them."

"Oh, yes, of course," Radek replies, sitting on the bed, "I forgot. We have secret jumper bay, one that's not above the Stargate. One that wasn't destroyed by the explosion. How foolish of me."

"There's no need to be--"

Radek continues, enjoying the chance to vent his frustration at this entire mess and McKay's cavalier attitude to it. It is too much, far too much, to deal with in one day. "It probably has magic puddlejumpers, too. The ones with really huge weapon systems, and engines that need no energy source, and limitless supplies of food. And you can take one back through time, and fix this whole mess!"

He stops. McKay sits upright. They both realize what he's said.

"Go back in time--"

"The jumper that Elizabeth used--"

"No scientist worth the title would destroy--"

"The prototype must be left here--"

"Or at least the notes, the theory behind it," McKay finishes, grinning and almost laughing in exhilaration. His eyes are bright, and he's clicking the fingers of one hand, sounding out the rhythm of his thoughts. "You're a genius. All we need to do is to search the database--"

"Make a program to search the database," Radek corrects, getting the laptop and connecting it to the Atlantis mainframe, because searching manually would be impossible in a database of that magnitude. "Search for the Ancient word for time and travel--"

"And traverse and any mention of Elizabeth--"

"--and have it search the untranslated data."

***

The first hour they program together: Radek typing line after line of code; McKay perched beside him on the bed, editorializing and suggesting additions as they go. By the start of the second hour, Radek is sick of McKay's interruptions and his grabby hands trying to pull the laptop closer. So he says, "If you want to do it so badly, then do it," and pushes the laptop at McKay.

"What are you doing?" McKay asks, but he's already pulling the laptop closer, hunching over it possessively.

"I'm going to take a shower," Radek calls over his shoulder, but McKay's already typing with one hand, and opening another powerbar with the other.

He stands under the hot water for an indecent length of time. The water won't go cold -- not like it did in Antarctica, cutting out after a few short minutes, barely long enough to melt the ice that settled bone-deep into tired arms and shoulders -- so he stands there as his fingers shrivel and prune, as his skin flushes lobster red under the heat.

It's not enough to melt away the last twenty-four hours.

But it washes away the stench of nervous sweat and the singed, burning smell that haunts his senses. He doesn't feel washed clean but wrung out, exhausted. When he gets out of the shower, he doesn't bother looking for a towel. Instead, he pulls on underwear, pants and T-shirt, and pads back to the bedroom. McKay has moved to the desk and doesn't look away from the dark screen.

Lying stomach-down on the bed, he pulls the pillow under his head. He doesn't bother hiding how securely he's clutching it.

He falls asleep to the sound of typing, to the annoyed huffs McKay makes when something doesn't work as well as it should, but this time he dreams. He dreams of Elizabeth's pale hands and the curve of her neck, he dreams of Major Sheppard's confident grin and dark aviator glasses. He dreams of Simpson's short, blonde hair, boldly colored by the sunlight slipping through stained glass. He dreams of Grodin's wry gaze and amused smirk. But most of all, he dreams of Elizabeth's pale hands.

When he wakes up, McKay's sitting cross-legged on the end of the bed, staring at the closed curtains hiding the window. Radek yawns, and reaches for his glasses, and McKay says, "I hated those curtains, you know. I was glad to leave them behind."

The curtains are cream, not much lighter than the grey walls of Atlantis. They're made from heavy cotton and everyone has a pair identical to them. "I liked the curtains."

McKay waves away his comment, a quick gesture that would be better suited to swatting a fly. "I never thought to pack curtains. I didn't think we'd have windows." There's a soft, far-away look in his eyes and his mouth is set in a short, pinched frown.

"No one knew what to bring," Radek says softly, because he's not quite sure what McKay's talking about. It's not curtains, that much is obvious. "We brought what we could."

"Yeah." McKay sighs, and his tight frown stretches into a wider scowl, an expression that pops up every time one of McKay's underlings can't meet a deadline. "The program's searching the database now. It'll take another two hours, at least."

Two hours according to McKay is about four hours by anyone else's watch. "We have nothing to do in the meantime?"

"We can't even play Solitaire on the laptop," McKay sighs and drops his head to his hands, rubbing at his eyes.

"It would slow the processor."

"Ah, yes," McKay says, giving an impatient nod of his head, "thank you. State the obvious. I knew I forgot to do something."

Radek pinches the bridge of his nose. He's barely woken up and he can already feel a headache coming on. "Rodney, please, get some sleep."

"I can't."

"Because it's impossible for you to apply reason to your own health?" Radek's lost track of time; he must have left his watch in the bathroom. It was ten a.m. when they evacuated, it was twenty-five past one when they walked through the halls (and that is still the most terrifying thing he's ever done), and the light hasn't faded yet. He might have had five hours sleep all in all -- maybe more, maybe less -- but McKay's certainly slept less than that.

"Because there's too much to do." McKay points at the laptop, then his hand lowers a fraction and he deflates. "And, okay, I can't actually do any of it until that's finished compiling results, but I'm currently more than a little scared -- I'd even go as far as to say petrified with fear at this stage -- and adrenaline's flooding through my system, so I'm not going to be sleeping any time soon."

It takes a lot of reasoned debate -- some of it yelled in Czech and using words his mother would never admit knowing -- to get McKay to see sense and sleep. Glaring, his blue eyes bleary and bloodshot, McKay makes Radek swear to wake him the moment the program catalogues its results. Radek nods and promises, and has no intention of keeping his word.

It's the logical decision, so he suffers no guilt over it. He's better at translating Ancient. McKay needs the sleep. There is something too frightening -- too disheartening -- about a McKay too tired to panic. Also, having two of them work on one laptop is unworkable, impractical.

It leaves him with time on his hands as McKay snores and the laptop whirrs through data.

For a moment, he's tempted to get out pen and paper, and write to his family: to his parents, to his three brothers, to his nephews and nieces. He wants to tell them about this beautiful place, about the majesty and wonder in every corridor. He wants to tell them about the city rising out of the waters, like a phoenix, like a miracle, like the granting of their most desperate wish. How water poured from spirals and towers, revealing color and light, beauty and hope. How their terror turned to awe.

He wants to tell them that he doesn't regret coming here. That it's been horrifying and scary, that he's always been half-sure that he'll die galaxies away from anywhere he's called home, but it's also been amazing, fulfilling on a soul-deep level. It's made him thankful for his life -- for his opportunities, for this place, for his potential -- in a way that safe laboratories on Earth never could.

He wants to say all this and more, but he doesn't. Partly because he doesn't have the words -- not in any language -- to be able to objectively write and accurately describe this marvel, and partly because they have a limited supply of paper and pens. A personal message is not the best use of scarce resources. Especially when they have no way to send it.

Everything is a scarce resource now: paper, pens, food. Even breathable air may become a concern in the near future. In a city the size of Manhattan, they are trapped like lab mice -- confined to one bedroom and one bathroom -- and even this room is bare and deprived. The walls are empty, the desktop clear, the bed stripped of its blanket, because blankets and warmth were important if they were to survive on an alien planet, and so they were packed and moved with everyone else. He doubts that any of the blankets survived the explosion.

To stop those thoughts, Radek gets a toothbrush out of McKay's backpack and goes to brush his teeth. The toothbrush clatters into the sink the first time he realizes that this is something Simpson and Grodin will never do again. He washes off the smear of white toothpaste and ignores the way his hands shake.

***

 

The program brings up forty-three references. Given the size of the database, it's a miniscule fraction of the whole. Given that they will need to translate each page to make sense of it, the problem remains daunting but Radek gets lucky. Within an hour, he's able to identify seventeen entries as historical or mythical stories, recorded in a section focusing on the culture and society of the Ancients. (The anthropologists would have had a field day with that. They didn't even know that section of the database existed.) After another two hours, he's managed to translate enough fragments to discount three more pages. Only twenty-three to go.

By the time McKay's snuffling into the pillow and waking up, he's down to nineteen. McKay whines about Radek not waking him, and complains about Radek's methods, reliability and general level of intelligence, then commandeers the laptop and starts translating the next page. Because McKay is McKay -- and fate doesn't favor fools, but reckless optimists -- that page is precisely what they're looking for: notes and detailed schematics for time-travel. It is so typical of Radek's life in Atlantis that he can't even muster the appropriate level of annoyance.

This is McKay. Half of his arrogance comes from his intellect -- impressive in its own right -- and the other half from his ridiculous luck. Answers fall into his lap moments before catastrophe strikes. The random combination, the one-in-ten-thousand chance, will work for him.

As with everything in Radek's life, there is an easy part and a hard part. The easy part is the prototype, since there are meticulous instructions -- "This must have been a personal diary," McKay says as he leans over Radek's shoulder and tries to fumble with Radek's translations, "it was probably buried within the main database," -- detailing where it was hidden. It is on the second floor, on the east side, directly beside the room housing the last naquadah generator, the one they had to leave here to power the Stargate. Radek had rolled his eyes and thought, of course the one last hope would be a few steps away from the main power source; after all, he was working with McKay.

The hard part is trying to translate the power needs. The prototype seems to be almost finished, but it doesn't follow any Earth-based hypotheses. Between them, they can barely follow the calculations, let alone the underlying theory.

It is frustrating, like trying to navigate through an over-furnished room by the glow of one lone LED clock. He knows where he wants to go, but he can't see where he's going or where he's been, and every time he turns around he stubs his toe on an unexplained variable or bruises his shin tripping over another confusing equation. McKay doesn't have the same problem, doesn't find it quite as painful. But that could be because he throws his metaphorical arms wide and grasps his way through the darkened room; he stumbles and complains, and makes his way one small millimeter at a time.

McKay is making progress -- sitting and kicking his foot against the wall, sometimes stopping to click his fingers, muttering, "Yes, yes, of course, that's obvious, I should have seen that. But this, here. Why?" -- so Radek leaves him to work through it.

He planned to sleep but his mind is too awake. Thinking of possibilities, of probabilities. If they could make the prototype work, if they could travel back in time and prevent the current circumstances, they could fix this. Fix the impossible. All with a simple application of effort and intellect, and they could save so many lives. It seems too easy. Too convenient. There is a small knot of dread sitting halfway between his stomach and his lungs, a clench of tension that tells him not to believe in blind faith, not to think that he alone can change the universe. He tells himself that he is with McKay -- McKay and his luck; McKay and his bullying, belligerent genius; McKay and his earnest compulsion to do what is right (when he knows what that is) -- but he cannot force himself to believe.

He can distract himself with more pleasant thoughts, though. Like the bottle of Zubrovka found in the labs, having been accidentally packed with the botany supplies. Like the expression on McKay's face when Kavanagh checkmated him within thirty-six moves. Like the way McKay falls asleep on the lab benches with one hand curled beneath his cheek and lips slightly parted.

Or the way those lips would feel against his. It was something he'd thought about, but not something he ever expected to know. Now he does. "You kissed me."

"No, I didn't." McKay doesn't look up from the laptop. "'I've been sitting here working on the power requirements."

"Not now," Radek says with only a touch of annoyance. "Before. During the self-destruct."

"Oh. That."

"Yes, that."

"And you're bringing this up now, because…?" The question hangs in the air, sounding irritated enough that Radek almost misses the red creeping up the back of McKay's tense neck.

"Because you kissed me. Because it's not something you usually do." Radek doesn't say 'because I want to know why'. They have both built careers on asking the reasons behind objects; McKay should be able to infer the question.

"I was in a sudden, certain death situation," McKay mutters. "It seemed like the thing to do."

"Kissing me seemed like the thing to do?" Raked wonders aloud, and McKay spins around to glare at him.

"It was a distracting, life-affirming kiss! When you're about to be blown up in a fiery explosion -- and hopefully die a short, pain-free death, as opposed to the lingering, pain-filled kind -- any type of distraction seems like a good idea."

Radek ignores McKay's flailing arms and outraged voice. He wouldn't have lasted on Atlantis if he'd reacted to those dramatics. "And you didn't think of, maybe, reciting pi to yourself instead?"

"That lacks certain life-affirming qualities," McKay says tersely, and apparently, he sees that as the end of the conversation, because he turns back to the calculations. He huffs, but he doesn't actually do anything.

"Typical," Radek says, not quite under his breath.

"What? What's typical?" McKay demands, jumping up like a jack-in-the-box. "That human beings seek a source of comfort and self-delusion during times of crisis? I am perfectly happy to be typical in this case."

"Typical that you would only act when we have seconds left to live."

"Hey, it's not--" McKay's voice stops, but his jaw keeps moving, opening and closing like a goldfish. "Wait a minute. You."

"Yes?"

"You have a thing for Elizabeth. It's common knowledge."

"I admire her," Radek says, following McKay's lead and using the present tense, "and I am attracted to her, yes."

The corners of McKay's mouth pull down and he juts his chin forward, refusing to be wrong even when he clearly is. "Which makes it somewhat unlikely that you'd be interested in me."

"No, of course not. How could I find someone attractive because they are intelligent and decisive, because they refuse to be daunted by social codes, because they can be brave and scared, and brilliant and ruthless, all at once. Of course, these are merits I would only find attractive in Elizabeth." Radek rolls his eyes and pushes his glasses up. "Really, Rodney. How binary can your mind be?"

McKay opens his mouth, blinks twice, and then sits at the desk. "I need to work on this." There's a moment of silence, where McKay doesn't type, meaning that he isn't thinking about their power concerns at all. Then, softly, he says, "You think I'm ruthless?"

"I've seen how you treat your staff."

"Yeah, but--"

Shrugging, Radek smiles. "I find it an attractive quality."

"Huh. Well," McKay says, in a strangely flat tone, "okay."

***

Radek wakes up to find McKay burrowing close to him -- the temperature controls are still set a little too low -- and yanking the one pillow out from under his head. "I was here first," he complains, groggily grabbing back.

McKay has the advantage of being awake and alert, and also fighting dirty. He lands an elbow in Radek's chest, and Radek's sudden need to stop and try to breathe allows pillow-theft to occur.

"It's my pillow," McKay says, settling the pillow under his head, and wrapping both arms around it. "My room, my pillow."

Rubbing at the centre of his ribcage, Radek spits back, "It's only here because you stole a second one from the medical station. This one was not yours to begin with -- you had no right to it -- and you have no right to it now. The pillow is mine because I am supposed to be sleeping. You are supposed to be working on the blueprints."

McKay had demanded that he work on them -- regardless of the fact that Radek's circuitry design was frequently cleaner, that he knew almost as much as McKay about Ancient power systems and slightly more than him when it came to boosting naquadah generators -- so Radek had slept.

"I've worked on them," and for the first time, Radek heard the emptiness in McKay's tone, "and now I'm going to sleep. On my pillow."

"Wait, wait. You worked out the power requirements?" Radek doesn't sit up, doesn't reach for his glasses, but it's only because the lights have turned off. They must be responding to McKay's will, which bothers him a little -- annoyance that he does not have the same control -- and worries him more. "How to use the generator?"

"I'd say it was relatively simple, but it wasn't. It would require someone with a vast wealth of experience in circuitry, electrical engineering and twisting the laws of reality to truly understand the genius of what I did. Luckily for us both, you have that, so you can look over my calculations in the morning."

The unsubtle compliment worries Radek even more. "Why shouldn't I look at it now?"

"Because it's right. I've calculated it three times, started from scratch, and each time, I get the same answer. I know how to hook it up, I know how much energy it will take, and there's no point in you looking at it now," McKay drags in an unsteady breath, his shoulders jerking as he does so, "because I'm *right*. There's nothing you can do to change it."

"What are you right about?"

"You can't fix it." McKay sits up, the pillow forgotten. The lights glow slightly, enough that Radek can make out the bowed profile, can see how McKay's broad back hunches over. "We can't fix it. I can barely follow the theories, barely understand how it folds the time-space continuum and what the technology needs to physically do. I can't correct it. I can't take it that next step."

"The device, the time-travel engine, it is not completed?" Radek has an arm around McKay's back before he realizes it. For a moment, McKay is tense under his hand, but then his head drops, and he doesn't pull away. It's hard to resist physical comfort when your entire world has dwindled to two people hiding in the shadows of closed curtains.

"Whatever Elizabeth traveled in, it wasn't this design. This might have been the basis for it, but there's no way that it required this level of energy. It would have needed two full ZPMs to take an entire puddlejumper back in time. He must have found a way to minimize the energy consumption, to maximize the usefulness of every volt." Another shaky breath. "And I can't do that."

"Given what we do know, what can the device send back?" Closing his eyes tightly, Radek waits for the bad news.

"Nothing," McKay whispers, and it's even worse than Radek had guessed. "Absolutely nothing. We don't have the energy to complete the transfer permanently. Even if we sent a paperclip back, it would still revert back to this timeline in a matter of minutes. It's a complete wash-out."

When in shock, time is meant to move slowly: adrenaline should flood the body and distort a person's responses. That has never happened to Radek. Time has never stretched into an infinite loop of nanoseconds; time has always kept moving, kept demanding, and it's not until the crisis is overcome that Radek's thoughts have bloomed without clear purpose, like watching mitosis under a microscope.

Right now, his first clear priority is to get through to McKay -- who is muttering under his breath and shaking apart -- because Radek knows he will not survive this alone. Get McKay through the night, and tomorrow, they can try to solve the impossible again. Sometime after that, he will feel and hurt and know what this means, but that won't be tonight.

Radek turns McKay towards him and the man flops against his shoulder like an abandoned rag-doll, saying, "We can't go back. We can't get out of here. There is no 'Get out of Jail Free' card for this. It's just us. It's us, trapped in a city of Wraith, with the option of starving to death or being eaten alive. There is no second chance here."

"Rodney." He curls a hand around the back of McKay's neck, strokes his thumb along the pulse behind McKay's ear. "We will think of something."

"We won't. We won't because there's nothing left. There's no one left. They've all been burnt to cinders, because I had to double back for my second spare laptop. There are Wraith gaining control of this city, there's nothing to stop them in this galaxy. And because of me, they may be on their way to Earth, to conquer the biggest smorgasbord they've ever dreamed of." McKay's breath hitches, blowing warm against Radek's neck. There is moisture against his shoulder, but Radek will never ask McKay about it. Instead, he tightens an arm around McKay. "And I'm not ruthless at all. I'm brilliant and useless and scared. This is too much."

The dim lights brighten slightly, and Radek pulls back, trailing a hand along McKay's neck, lightly across his Adam's apple, and then cupping his jaw. "It is only too much now. In the morning--"

"It will be worse," McKay says, his wide mouth flattened and his eyes flickering down. Radek leaves his hands where they are, the warmth of McKay's skin bleeding through his fingertips. McKay leans, drifting immeasurably closer, and again his eyes flicker from Radek's eyes to his lips. "I'm smart enough to know precisely how screwed we are. At least give me that much credit."

"In the morning, we will look over it. Maybe one of your underlying assumptions was wrong, maybe you transposed two numbers. We're working round the clock in the most basic of conditions." Radek smiles, nodding to himself as he lifts his other hand and slowly rests it on the curve of McKay's hip. "It does not make for accurate thinking."

"No, not accurate." McKay swallows, looking down at Radek's hand. His lashes look dark and luxurious in the half-shadow. "But that doesn't mean I'm wrong."

Radek leans in, stopping a bare inch from McKay's lips. "Doesn't mean you're right either." Then they're kissing like atoms colliding -- like desperation and distraction brought to life -- and the room blankets them in darkness.

***

Radek dreams of being nine years old, and the first day of winter when the air was already chilled and the city was sugar-coated in snow. He had loved winter: loved trudging through the dirty, icy slush; loved the way that it crackled and crunched under his feet; loved seeing the plume of his breath in the frozen air, even if it fogged up his glasses. But that was when he was young, when he could run through the streets to warm up. The cold is not as much fun when you're stuck in a lab for twelve hours straight.

Now he is traveling through Poland to Minsk, an earnest post-grad student headed to the Belarusian State University, specifically, to the National Centre of Particle and High Energy Physics. The view from the train window is monotonous and reassuring. Green fields, laced with the dry brown of scrub, stretch towards the mountains. The sky is cotton-wool layers of grey and silver, beautiful and dour, sharply cut by the purple-olive silhouette of distant hills. The light is muted, glaring and colorless, leaving no shadows. Under the trees, there are vague blurs where the ground looks darker, but they are mere ghosts of shadows: places where shadows should be but aren't.

Radek is cold around the edges: fingers and toes chilled; the end of his nose dry-iced and numb. He crosses his arms, huddles and shivers for warmth, and snaps awake.

The air around him is cold, leaving his bare skin crawling with goosebumps. On the other side of the single mattress, McKay lies on his side, curled possessively around the pillow. His jacket -- and Radek's own -- is draped over his shoulders like the worlds smallest blankets. Trousers sit low across McKay's hips -- still unfastened from last night, Radek suspects -- and the few inches of exposed skin are pale and pebbled. Also soft: Radek knows that from personal, grasping, experience.

Instead of reaching out to touch, to anchor one recollection to reality, Radek slinks out of bed and into the shower. The hot water sluices through the saliva and sweat caking his skin.

Water surrounds him, from the crash of distant waves against Atlantis' supports to the warmth cascading over his shoulders, raining down against his scalp and soaking his fine, and thinning, hair. Resting his forehead against the cool glass, Radek tries to tune out the physical sensations and listen to the chaos of droplets hitting glass and ceramics. There is a pattern, a calculateable probability, behind the sounds. If he had the data -- the rate of flow, the direction and size of the showerhead's jets, the precise mass and position of his own imperfect body -- he could plot the trajectories and predict the spray. He could understand it instead of merely observing and knowing it must be there.

But he does not have that perfect data. He could estimate and assume, but his results would be imprecise, unreliable. Wrong.

Rate of flow, the dimensions of the shower stall: those are easy. It is the human side of the calculation that makes it difficult. Mass and shape that can change by the hour, scars and idiosyncrasies that cannot be graphed or theorized. But if you remove the human figures…

…the calculations become easy. Become reliable. Useful!

Radek feels like a fool, an incompetent, for not seeing it sooner. He rushes out of the shower and in is haste, stubs his toes painfully. Which is of no consequence because McKay's calculations are incorrect, unusable. Two uncertain human figures? No matter how good McKay's theory, the results would still be futile. They need to recalculate, to use a reliable mass. He can hear himself babbling in Czech, trying to explain, while he hops on one foot and rubs his injured toes.

Chortling, McKay sits up on the bed. "Early morning slapstick. I never knew you were such a comedian."

"Yes, yes, very funny." Radek sits down and rubs his foot with a little dignity, very little dignity in point of fact. "And now you are awake, let us discuss how wrong you are."

McKay's sniggers stop and one fair, practical hand tightens into an impotent fist. "My conclusions were right."

"They couldn't be." Radek waves at McKay, want the man to be quiet for once; this is important. "You tried to calculate the power needed to transport two people. Human bodies. Bodies with variable mass, bodies that move and breathe--"

"Elizabeth traveled--" Sitting up and interrupting, and of course McKay could not simply listen.

"Elizabeth was in the jumper." Radek outlines a cube using both straight hands. "Contained, within a specified area. The device did not factor in human variables, only the mass contained within the jumper."

"Oh," McKay huffs softly, understanding. "Even if we could produce that level of power -- which we couldn't, not even for a nanosecond -- it wouldn't have been safe. We could have gone back and left parts of us behind. Important parts, like skin and blood, and possibly bone."

Radek closes his eyes and sees the smoking gateroom and that grotesque disembodied arm lying amongst the rubble. He wonders if the grey sleeve was actually edged in red, or if that detail was invented by his nightmares. He opens his eyes to the small room, to the closed curtains and bare single bed, to the animated scientist beside him.

McKay is still talking. "Painful and terrifying as that is, it doesn't solve our problem. We have a time machine and nothing to send back."

Shifting on the bed, Radek's gaze falls on the laptop. "Not nothing," he says slowly, almost laughing at the obviousness of the solution.

"What do you mean, not nothing-- oh." Then again McKay says, as if the blatancy of the answer needs more emphasis, "Oh."

Radek nods. The answer had been under their fingertips, quite literally. "We send it back--"

"--and leave a message on it--"

"--a warning--"

"--details of the Wraith attack." McKay snaps his fingers repeatedly. "A timeframe of the attack, the correct estimates of their hyperdrive and this time, when we get the weapons satellite online, there'll be something to aim at."

McKay goes from lounging across the bed to pacing the room in a matter of seconds. Then he is waving his hands, one corner of his mouth grinning as the other shoots ideas into the air. "We can blow up the hive ships before they even arrive. We don't save the evacuation attempt, we save the whole city. Without a direct fight, a casualty free win!"

Radek feels his jaw drop. He is staring at McKay, knows he must look like the village idiot, but he's too mesmerized by McKay's sharp blue eyes and rising enthusiasm to truly care.

"In fact," McKay turns sharply towards Radek and freezes, "that answers our energy deficiency, too. We don't need to send the laptop back permanently. We only need to send it back long enough to connect to the network and transfer the data files. We only need to power the time travel for a few minutes."

The laptop has wireless capabilities, so they could send it back anywhere within the powered sections of Atlantis and McKay's crazy ideas would work. "Yes, we could--"

"You should work on the power requirements. No, scratch that. I'm the one who understands why the equation works and there's no point wasting time with you fumbling and muddling up the arithmetic. I'll work out how much power we'll need to transport the laptop." McKay nods his head at his own command. Radek isn't too surprised, or offended, that McKay only trusts himself to do it. "You should work on the power output. What's the maximum amount of power we can get from one naquadah generator? Can we leech any power out of the city itself?"

McKay opens his mouth, ready to bark out more orders, but then he closes it again. He blinks and swallows, then says, "But first, you should put some clothes on."

***

Radek has twelve pages of calculations: equations stretching over two or three lines, asterisks and arrows notating ideas for further evolution; big circles around the answers that simply won't work, that don't match established data (the ones that feel wrong). His fingers are cramped and cold enough that his fingernails are no longer seashell-pink but a creeping violet.

This would all be much easier if he was working on the laptop but McKay's taken it, the desk and a notebook, and claiming them back is not worth the effort. Not yet, at any rate. None of his answers are encouraging but he does have one idea that may -- possibly, if they are extremely lucky -- work. The naquadah generators have safety measures to stop overloads but if they could bypass the self-protection devices, the generator could be run at a far higher output. It is a good chance -- at the moment, it looks like their only chance -- but he is not McKay. He won't suggest a radical plan while ignoring the difficulties and risks. He would not try to convince others with an unsupported assurance that he can make it work. He would rather calculate the risks first; find a workable solution before he presents his ideas. So for the moment, he will wait until McKay sleeps to graph his calculations.

The difficulties are only partly mathematical -- how much power? How long can it be stabilized? -- because there is also the problem of tools. They only have pens, toothbrushes and MREs, which are not the best tools for rewiring safety protocols on sensitive generators. He hasn't worked in such under-funded conditions since he was a student.

"I did my doctorate at NC-PHEP." Radek rests his pen on the page and shifts the pillow between him and the wall. Through the curtains behind his head, he can feel the unkind glass of windows they fearfully keep covered.

"Hmm."

"In Belarus," Radek adds, as if it makes a difference.

He doesn't expect McKay's attention but there's a flash of interested blue eyes when McKay glances over his shoulder. "The high energy physics place, right? In Minsk?"

Radek nods.

"I was there for a few weeks in the late 90s. I was working in Russia -- this was the first time I got traded over there, before Area 51 -- and they were supposed to correlate and support my calculations. Every time they ran the experiments, the results undermined my entire hypothesis. It took me two weeks to find the moron who couldn't carry a decimal place. A digital oscillograph shouldn't be handled by someone still mastering the Etch-A-Sketch." McKay's shoulders are slumped and he's slouching in the chair, legs stretched out straight in front of him. He talks without eye-contact, without basic courtesy, with the self-assurance of someone who expects to be listened to, who knows the value of his thoughts. "It seemed like a miniature USSR: 'market socialism' and a republic that only had one real choice of leader. Why would you choose to go there?"

"They offered me a research position. I was twenty-six, I had my Masters qualifications and was, let's say 'eligible', for eighteen months of conscription."

"So fleeing to a country where you could live fairly well on a researcher's salary was a solution?"

"A workable one, yes," Radek says, making himself comfortable on the bed. His current problems are overwhelming and the answers are hiding from him, buried somewhere within his pages of notes. He can afford to soak in memories for a little while. "When I got there, they were still reorganizing from communist control. It was a new market economy."

McKay snorts.

"I was there when they voted in Lukashenko, when he was a bold leader who would shape the republic for the new millennium. I saw the free market economy become water painted communism. Saw the cost of living drop under 'wealth redistribution' schemes." He had stepped out of his lab, out of his relatively safe University campus, and watched the country change: all small insidious changes that felt too familiar. "I grew up with that at home, in Orgava. As soon as I graduated, I left for the United States."

"Attracted to the Land of the Free?" McKay has stone-hard views on America -- and Canada's clear superiority -- but Radek doesn't want to listen to the memorable rant again.

"The plane to America, it was so different from the train to Minsk."

"I'd suggest it was more comfortable, but those economy seats are a subtle form of torture. They're designed by sadists."

"The difference was how it felt. I was traveling to an opportunity in Minsk, to possibilities, to new knowledge. When I left, part of that hope, that idealism, was left behind." Along with Dmitri's grin, his warming stews, his naïve certainty and careful fingers. He'd almost forgotten those things. "It was a retreat. The journey itself was a retreat, not an exploration. That was the difference."

And that is the difference now. McKay wants to think of this as a rescue mission, but it's a calculated defeat. They are rats fleeing the sinking ship: fleeing the Wraith, fleeing the deaths, fleeing the loss of their dreams of adventure and discovery. The most they can hope for is to leave the city as blackened, shattered debris on the ocean floor.

"It was hours cramped on public transport with strangers," McKay says, lazily hitting the enter key. "I don't see how one was any better than the other."

"I mourned for what I lost. It wasn't until I was crossing the ocean that it became clear to me. I would never walk down those streets again, never huddle against the spring winds or complain about the summer heat. The distant acquaintances -- the girl at the local café, the couple who lived below me, the lecturers from other faculties -- I would never see them again, never pass them in the street, in the corridor, never say 'hello'."

"You mourned for dirty streets and people you didn't know," McKay says, like he lacks the depth of character to understand Radek's point. It's a lie. Radek has seen the picture that sat beside McKay's bed -- before they all cleared out their rooms, before they made sure that only sterile furniture and closed curtains would be left to explode with the city -- the overgrown ginger tabby that McKay would have traded his personal coffee supplies to bring. "If you're going to be uselessly sentimental, shouldn't you mourn Orgava more? Your hometown, leaving the place of your birth and all that rubbish?"

For an instant, Radek's surprised. They've spent the better part of a year discussing quantum physics and wormhole mechanics. He doesn't think he's ever mentioned his place of birth. Then it hits him: McKay has access to personnel files. That explains how he knows, but it's oddly touching that McKay remembered.

"I spent hours sitting on cheap, rough wool, staring out the window and waiting for the landscape to change. I suffered the indignity of trying to balance on a tiny, moving, shuddering toilet. I lived on cold stew and packed sandwiches and when the train finally stopped moving, when I finally walked down those narrow aisles of nearly empty seats and disembarked, it was only to get on another train and start moving again. I spent the night too excited to sleep, my chin propped on my hand as I ignored the bright reflection in the window, looked past it into the undefined dark. I huddled in my coat, mesmerized by the rail line beside us, twin rows of midnight metal, carriage lights glinting and streaking the blackness. The wooden -- slats? Beams? -- between the rails were a blur. It was a constant companion stretching beside us, sharing the most thrilling trek I had ever taken."

McKay spins around and the tilt of his head makes his chin sharp and prominent. "You really like trains, huh?"

"You have a skill for taking a deeply personal moment and stripping it like hydrochloric acid."

"I'm not the one who started reminiscing about train-trips of my youth. I'm the one who's still -- oh, what's the word? -- *working*." McKay's hands wave once, twice, and then hover in the air. "Why did you bring this up?"

He is trapped in a small room with one man and his overwhelming ego. Outside the door, there are monsters waiting in the dark, waiting with the ghosts of possibilities. The moments that shaped his life -- that made him feel, yearn and grow into the man he is now -- these moments will die with him. He wants someone to understand why they meant so much.

Instead he says, "My fingers are turning blue. That's how cold I am. The last time I was this cold, I was traveling across Eastern Europe in a draft-ridden train."

"Oh," McKay says, and then, "Hmmm. There must be something wrong with the environmental controls."

Pulling his legs up on the bed, Radek palms his bony knees. The material of his trousers feels painfully thin. "Insufficient power?"

"We should have enough. Most of the secondary systems were disabled. Half the primary systems were shut down to make sure we'd be able to power the gate."

"And the self-destruct, which was never used--"

"So we should have the power sitting there." McKay starts saving and closing programs. The screen flicks over to diagnostics, looking for physical damage.

His view of the laptop is obscured by McKay's shoulder, so it's pointless trying to squint and read it. "You think it was damaged in the invasion?"

"The main controls are nowhere near the jumper bay," McKay says, half-dismissive and half-annoyed at an unknown problem. "But we can safely assume the jumper bay now has a gaping hole above it. Maybe the environmental systems are trying to compensate and have overloaded something."

"Unlikely." Leaning his head back, Radek stares at the ceiling, trying to visualize the electrical circuits of Atlantis. In his mind, the power conduits are red, the weapons system's yellow, the database is blue, and the environmental system's green. There are secondary controls in the jumper bay but those parallel circuits should have been destroyed, eliminated, without affecting the rest of the city. "If the residential areas are suffering extremes, there must be a programming error. Perhaps the extra shields around the database have interfered?"

"Not unless your computer skills have suddenly devolved to Nguyen's level." Nguyen, if Radek remembers right, was the botanist who tried to adjust the botany lights and ended up burning half the hydroponic plants, and the reason that McKay had required all future maintenance reprogramming be requested in writing and only completed by the assigned technician.

"Last I checked, you still understood the difference between--" McKay stops, wide mouth snapping shut like a bullfrog. He puffs up his cheeks -- increasing the amphibian resemblance -- and Radek is up and off the bed, leaning over McKay's shoulder to read the bad news for himself.

"Oh."

McKay's fingers scurry across the keyboard and the screen flashes 'accessing control systems' in it's fine, red font. "You protected the database. We re-routed control and you set up extra shields around the database."

"It was the biggest risk--"

"You only protected the database." McKay's face flushes, his voice getting louder. "Not the environmental systems, not the master controls. How could you be so completely, utterly stupid?"

"Rodney--"

"And the weapons system. That's what they're accessing: our weapons system! There are Wraith sinking their greedy talons into weapon controls for my city, all because you were too short-sighted to protect it."

"*McKay*." This was not his fault alone, this was not a careless, negligent oversight. He does not like losing his temper, losing control, but at this moment, he is close. McKay must hear it because his eyes widen and his mouth finally closes. "The database was a more immediate threat. The weapons system had no power."

McKay swallows, and Radek appreciates the man's attempt to control his natural urge to rant and rave and blame everyone around him. "Now it does," he says, almost civilly.

"How?"

"They've minimized life support and cut power to the ventilation systems, which implies that the Wraith don't need the same levels of oxygen as humans. Carson would be fascinated. It explains-- never mind, not important now. The important thing is to get control back."

After hours of programming -- of debating and counteracting and undermining the Wraith without leaving obvious evidence of their existence -- they stop to eat. They open their MREs and McKay silently slides across his single sachet of coffee. Radek takes it as an apology.

***

They get control, but it's a temporary measure, a plaster pressed over the gash cutting to the bone. It won't protect them for long. It clarifies the situation.

They don't have time to be cautious, to be careful about unknown dangers -- not when the known dangers are so close, so unstable -- so Radek tells McKay about his ideas for power. McKay splutters about suicidal idiots, about how overloading the generator like that will result in a nuclear explosion that would wipe out the Wraith, them and most of Atlantis -- as if Radek didn't know about elementary physics, as if he'd never heard of Newton's actions and reactions -- and after the waving arms stop, the shrillness gets swallowed by silence, McKay nods.

"You really think this is the only way?" McKay asks, shocked and sad and disbelieving.

"I would not suggest it otherwise."

"But…" Here, McKay drifts off, silenced by the weight of this plan. "This isn't-- We won't walk away from-- Are you *sure*? You have to be sure about this."

"The only way we can produce even half of the power requirements you calculated is by doing this. The generator has to be overloaded. And for the time-travel device to work, we have to be there to set the connections. There will be an explosion, it will destroy most of the city, but it is the only way--" He tries to say it slowly, to make it sound like the logical, rational choice (which it is), but his voice wavers. "The only way to fix it."

McKay takes a step back, his mouth a slack, worried line of parted lips. Then he gives his head a quick shake, takes a breath and says, "Then we have to do it. And we will, because this is what we do. We fix the impossible."

Then he's grabbing at calculations, at the laptop, and they're moving onto the next problem.

They can power the time-travel engine. With one variable gone, they know how long they can send the laptop back: a fraction of a second. They need a way to compress the data, to be able to transfer it in that time, and McKay's half-completed compression codes are their best chance.

Again, there are flapping hands and loud objections from McKay: it's impossible, impractical, and unwieldy; he's already devoted hours to it and if it was possible, he would have completed it, they would have already contacted Earth. Radek doesn't argue -- doesn't waste his breath -- he simply takes the laptop and starts accessing McKay's notes, working through it from the beginning. It doesn't take long for McKay to lean over his shoulder, warm and annoying, and start suggesting new approaches.

By the time they complete it, by the time they polish it and test it enough to know it will work, there is no daylight creeping under the curtains. The window is dark, and Radek desperately wants to open it, to peer outside at the alien constellations. To see them one last time. He doesn't dare.

***

They pack McKay's rucksack without speaking, neatly piling the remaining MREs next to the disconnected laptop, everything moving as fast as McKay's mind. The room is cleared, they know the route to the generator and McKay only speaks when they're standing at the closed door. "We have to do this right."

Radek nods. He knows the risks. "I know the plan."

"We can't afford to get caught. It's a danger to every-- to everyone. Everything." McKay's fingers clench around a strap, and his thumb brushes the material slowly. "And I don't deal well with torture."

Until that moment, that was the one horrifying thought that hadn't crossed Radek's mind. "Rodney--"

"And, um, if anything happens," McKay's saying, looking distinctly uncomfortable as he hoists the bag onto his back, "you know what to do? I mean, you should--"

"I take the backpack. I send the laptop back."

"And don't stop. Don't come back for me. If something happens on the way there, stick to the plan." Then McKay twists his shoulders, settling into the weight of the straps, and opens the door.

The trip to the generator is uneventful, ordinary, apart from the threat of being shot, stunned, and drained of all life that hangs above their heads. Radek watches his feet and tries not to think about it, tries not to think about anything. He doesn't want to think about what's roaming the darkened city; doesn't want to wonder if it's a lack of sleep, lack of circulation, that's chilling his neck and numbing his fingers, or if it's getting colder as they walk. He doesn't want to think about the plan, doesn't want to think about the protocols he'll need to disable on the generator while McKay finds and prepares the time-engine.

He would rather count out his steps, time them to a beat of four as they move through this corridor, around the corner, and down another. They debated using the transporters -- it would save time, but might alert the Wraith -- but now Radek wishes they had. He wants this march to be over. He is almost too terrified to be frightened: it's too much, far too much to understand in any way but the intellectual. His soul feels frozen, unfeeling.

He wants the next two hours of his life to be over, before he has a chance to object, to fail, to ruin McKay's attempts to salvage the situation. McKay is right. Even if this doesn't work, even if they can't change the past, the explosion will destroy a sizable portion of the Wraith population. The suffering in the Pegasus Galaxy will not be solved, but it will be eased.

That is the thought Radek clings to, through another identical corridor, through halls that used to be filled with science and discussion and movement. Whether they fail or succeed, they will help others. Their deaths will be anonymous, unrecorded, unremembered, but they'll mean something. There is value to their actions. Two lives is a small cost when compared to an entire galaxy in danger (especially considering that they awoke the danger in the first place).

It is a worthy sacrifice.

Radek keeps those words in his head, keeps them repeating around his brain. Eight syllables, in time with his steps. Repeated until they stop walking, until he's standing in front of the generator with a tiny toolkit in his hands -- "I kept it with the generator. For emergencies," McKay said, like it was obvious, "and for the times I was too lazy to go back to the lab for a simple screwdriver." -- rewiring circuits as McKay hums and huffs over a football-shaped device of silver curves and amber screens. Then he's too distracted by keeping his hands steady, keeping his mind focused on the metal in front of him instead of the creaking sounds of an empty city, to remember the mantra.

The circuitry cover snaps shut with a tiny click. Radek's eyes are bleary, gritty with lack of sleep. His arms and legs feel sore, cramped, but he gets out the laptop, doing what needs to be done. He opens their makeshift program. It's a simple one that continually transfers the data files onto the main system, sending them over and over, so that when the laptop is ferried to the past, the files will automatically downloaded.

They had discussed sending a letter back, explaining what had happened, but McKay had paled sharply and Radek couldn't stomach the idea of writing this, of making every loss, each death, real by committing it to words. Instead, they had decided to send it to McKay's personal folder, where all work done after midnight is saved and checked for logical fallacies and punch-drunk insanity in the morning. McKay claimed that sometimes he didn't even remember what he'd worked on the night before, until he found the finished notes waiting for his perusal the next day. It was the perfect place to hide new information like corrected timeframes and new compression codes, and have McKay assume it's his own work (and another example of his genius).

Radek sets up the laptop and stands back as McKay fiddles with the generator, double-checking Radek's work, and then connects it to the time-travel engine in a messy, inelegant way. He hits a few invisible buttons, fingers tap-dancing across the glowing symbols until the device is humming, waiting for the energy burst to send the laptop back.

"I'm not good with farewells," McKay says, rubbing his palms against his jacket like a child with dirty hands. "I'm not really sure what to say."

"Say that you did as well as you could. Say that you tried to do things well and that more often than not, you succeeded." Stepping closer, Radek wants to leech the nervous bravery out of McKay's bones. He desperately wants to be brave enough to do this. "Say that the sacrifice is worth it."

"It is," McKay says, one warm settling on Radek's shoulder and the other pushing the generator's switch-top into place. Then he pulls Radek's lips against his, squandering these last seconds hungrily sucking at Radek's tongue. Radek's knees tremble, like his stuttering pulse, and he can't help tensing, knowing what's coming. For a moment, he almost believes it's a reaction to McKay's mouth. Burying his hands in McKay's warmth, Radek closes his eyes.

The explosion is blinding white, and it sears stars on the back of his eyelids.


End file.
